Tuesday, June 15, 2010

The Crowded Mind :: Otium Divos Rogat :: II:16

There are some intriguing metaphors in this ode, which deals with the meaning of peace and tranquility and its opposite, strife and worry. In lines 9 to 12, we see the mind compared, I suppose, to a noisy crowd, care to a bird caught inside a beautifully ceilinged house:

non enim gazae neque consularis

summovet lictor miseros tumultus

mentis et cura laqueata circum

tecta volantis

A very literal translation would be:

In fact, the government official

of the treasure and of the consul

does not move aside the poor tumult

of the mind and worry flying around

the paneled ceiling.

A very simple interpretation would be:

Wealth and position cannot quiet the mind

crowded with thoughts; plus, your worries

are out of control.

A very difficult interpretation would be beyond what I could write here. It would involve showing not only how these lines are related to the rest of the poem but how they are part of the fabric of Horace’s entire work.

Metaphor, of course, it what poetry is best at. With just a few words the poet can create a very complex image, like the one above that is fresh and captivating. In today’s poetry, where freshness, aptness, and just plain surprise are everything, Horace’s lines seem curiously modern. Perhaps I think this because before the twentieth century, poetry seemed riddled, from our perspective, with hackneyed images, overused metaphors. Take for example Homer’s wine-colored sea, his rosy-fingered dawn. It occurs over and over until one is sick of it. But that’s us. We don’t live in his times, when poetry was oral, when poetry was story-telling and repeating a metaphor was one way to hold the audience’s attention, to keep the rhythm of the poem going.

If we don't like hackneyed images and overused metaphors, all we have to do is turn to Persian poetry, where metaphors seem to be like heirlooms. They are handed down from one generation of poets to the next to be used and cherished. The Persian writes of his beloved having a tiny ruby mouth, pomegranate tears, and jasmine breasts. Read this in one poet’s work and you are sure to find the same in another’s. But in Persian poetry, especially mystical poetry, these hand-me-downs are no longer metaphors. They become symbols for ideas so complex and abstract that it may take the reader an entire lifetime to fully understand and appreciate them.

Returning to Horace: I don’t want to give the impression that every one of his images is new. Scholars are quick to point out that such and such a metaphor was used by such and such Greek poet or that a particular image was ‘borrowed’ from some Roman. But I look at this borrowing as respect for what came before and acknowledgement of the consummate skill and erudition on the part of others.

And I don’t want to give the impression either that Persian poets are tied to the same metaphors and imagery of their predecessors. In Jami’s [1414-1492] long poem about the handsome Joseph [the same one who appears both in the Old Testament and in the Qur’an] and the beautiful Zulaikha, I happened upon this line the other day:

درایننوبتگهصورتپرستیزندهرکــسبهنوبتکــوسهـستی

In this watchtower of worshipping the outer form,

everyone beats the drum of [his own] existence

For want of a better word in English, I chose watchtower to mean the place where the drums are beaten to mark the hour. Here the watchtower is a metaphor for the world. The word in Persian also means ‘a place where tents are set up’ and ‘a jail.’ Both these meanings are apt, for to the Persian the world was a nomad’s camp as well as a prison for the soul. A few lines after this, Jami entertains us with another interesting metaphor about the heavens and how one must lose the self to see the stars:

گر از گـردون نگــردد نـور خــود گـم نگـیـرد رونـقی بـازار انـجـم

If from the turning heavens,

the light of the self does not become lost,

the bazaar of the stars will have no glory.

Before going on to the translation of Horace’s ode, I’d like to point out one of the more difficult passages, the rather telegraphic fifth and sixth lines:

ōtium bellō furiosa Thrācē

ōtium Mēdī pharetrā decorī

What made this passage difficult was when I compared my understanding of it with the translation done by Jeffrey Henderson [Loeb]. He wrote:

A quiet life is the prayer of Thrace

when madness leads to war.

A quiet life is the prayer of the Medes

when fighting with painted quivers.

It took me a while to figure out that his translation is more an explanation than it is an attempt to mirror what Horace says. That aside, there was, to my mind, a big problem with the last line quoted above. Decorī [decorated], as far as I know, can’t modify pharetrā [quiver].Decorī is not feminine; it’s masculine plural and has to modify Medes. I checked the meter—Sapphic Strophe—and saw that pharetrā has to end in a long ā, putting it in one of the oblique cases such as the ablative or the dative.

I read and reread the notes done by Clement Lawrence Smith [1903] and Daniel H. Garrison [1991]. They seemed to make these lines even more confusing. Then I looked at the commentarii done centuries ago and the recent French translation posted online and found what I think to be the correct way to interpret these lines—if only because it agreed with my interpretation. First the comment made by Helenius Acron [probably the fifth century]:

. . . . splendore decori sunt Persae

. . . . Persians are splendidly decorated

Now the French translation:

La Thrace furieuse au combat

et les Mèdes ornés du carquois

demandent . . . le repos . . . .

Thrace furious in combat

and the Medes ornamented

with a quiver ask for ... rest....

notes:

lictor: a court official who cried, “Make way for the judge!”

consul: one of the two highest magistrates of Rome.

eurus: southeast wind

Tithonus [Τιθωνός]: He was given immortality but not eternal youth; so after becoming very, very old, he was changed into a cicada!

Parca: one of the goddesses of Fate; the others are Nona, Decuma, and Morta.